No. 7. DEPARTMENT OP AGRICULTURB. 175 



it was not doing any good. As to the percentage of trees which are, 

 or have been, infested, — in one large section of perhaps forty square 

 miles, talcing fruit trees wliich liave been planted more than one 

 summer, the tree which does not carry San Josti Scale is an excep- 

 tion. The percentage of infested trees approximates 100 per cent. 

 In another section embracing the Southern River, and Muddy Creek 

 hills, where the orchards are far apart and separated by large tim- 

 ber tracts, it was not unusual to have to search for some time to 

 find any Scale. I am not able to state what interest the people in 

 York county took in the scale two years ago. There are many 

 more people taking an interest in the subject than there were one 

 year ago, and the ones who took an interest a year ago are taking a 

 greater interest now. In fact I find that the people of a locality 

 take a much greater interest a week after I i>ass through tlian when 

 I am working there. The reception of the inspector is cordial, and 

 in some cases effusively so. There are isolated exceptions to this 

 rule. 



The remedies used in the section of York county which I have in- 

 spected range all the way from ashes to horseshoes. The spraying 

 Jias been mostly done with Scalecide, home-made Lime-sulfur, and 

 Thomsen's prepared Lime-sulfur. The Scalecide has mostly been 

 used at a strength of 1-20 and 1-18. In either case I am not expert 

 enough to detect the slightest benefit. 



A few have read the Bulletins of the State Zoologist and have 

 used it at 1 to 10 or 1 to 12 in which case the benefits have been in 

 proportion to the thoroughness of the work when applied to apple 

 and pear trees. I know of an eight-acre peach orchard where the 

 fruit buds were ruined by Scalecide on all except two rows, which 

 were evidently treated with a weaker solution, as there was more 

 scale on them than on the barren trees. 



The Thomsen Chemical Co., of Baltimore, last spring put upon 

 the market a preparation of lime and sulphur and a quantity of it 

 was sold in the southern part of York county, but in a territory 

 which I had already inspected. 



I have seen five orchards where it^was used. In three of these the 

 owners insisted that they had made a thorough spraying. In all of 

 them the results were poor. This was a disappointment to me as 

 I knew that the great bugaboo in the pathway of the lime-sulphur 

 was its preparation. 



The benefits of the home-made lime-sulphur are in exact proportion 

 to the thoroughness of the work, commencing down somewhere near 

 zero in the case of the man who boiled the sulphur alone and mixed 

 it with the cold slacked lime afterward, and ending at nearly 100 in 

 the ease of the man who properly prepared and thoroughly applied 

 it. The outlook for fruit growing in York county is good, but just 

 at present it looks upon a prospect of larger orchards and fewer of 

 them. It is up to the educators of the Agricultural Department to 

 save as many as possible of the thousands of small orchards which 

 are imperiled by the ignorance of their owners. The time will come 

 to each owner of an orchard when he will be an interested listener 

 to the man who wants to help him. To some it will come rather 

 late, but to/ very many the recognition of the need for help will 

 come hand in hand with the needed help. Especially, if the powers 

 that be see fit to continue the good work, the usefulness of which 

 in York county at least, is but fairly commenced; which is only un- 



